‘The Lepracaun Cartoon Monthly’, which ran from 1905 to 1915, was Dublin’s leading satirical publication. While its sympathies were more with Sinn Féin, Home Rule campaigner John Redmond, in his triumphs and failure, was to feature extensively in its pages.

John F Deane has written an honest book and filled it with some beautiful poetry. His life and times in Achill and beyond are described in the sort of prose that reminds you, and even jaundiced Irish-speaking reviewers too, why people like the English language

The lives of the Catholic nationalist community in the North, but also its wider migrations and fate in the fledgling new Irish Free State and in Britain, North America and further afield is a fascinating history of adaptation and adoption as much as restlessness and disaffection.

Two biographies of 1916 organisers Thomas MacDonagh and Eamonn Ceannt reveal strongly contrasting personalities, the former a cultured and cosmopolitan figure who saw his death as a symbolic sacrifice, the latter a determined fighter who had no wish to surrender or die.

The occupation by the Provisional Government’s Army of the military barracks in Dublin laid the seeds of victory for the pro-Treaty side at the outbreak of the Civil War. Even though anti-Treaty forces seized many barracks across the country, control of the capital was the key.

The bursting forth of user-generated content was supposed to dethrone the captains of the culture industry still languishing in dreary, elitist old media formats. Instead, much of what is reported as mass opinion on social media represents less a 'democratic revolution' than the niche cultural interests of a few hundred young underemployed knowledge economy workers.

During the years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the media, and particularly BBC television, came under pressure to assist the state’s war against armed revolt rather than fulfilling its duty to be impartial and to inform. For the most part, it resisted that pressure

An inspiring new collection of essays by a doctor and literary scholar affirms Beckett’s intuition that it is ‘the occasional glimpse’ of mutual recognition ‘by us in them and ... by them in us of that smile at the human condition’ which makes it worthwhile to go on.

‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ The writings of Julian of Norwich communicate an urgent message of hope and love and stand among the finest literary achievements of the later Middle Ages. But to translate them into modern English is to diminish their power.

The story of John Redmond’s final rise and fall is by no means an easy one to tell, but a new study has given shrewd consideration to how it should be done and provides an impressively detached account of the late political career which omits nothing that is salient.